Okay, so I'm back. Having re-read Second Place, having done my charts and graphs, having met with my cohorts to discuss the book, I'm going to try to work through a couple of ideas I have in my head at this point.
I suppose the biggest question for me as a reader, and I suspect for other readers as well, is what to make of the narrator, M. The whole book is essentially a monologue on her part, and that's sort of a problem, in that what she has to say about her hopes and dreams is frequently at odds with her behaviors in pursuing those hopes and dreams. For example, she claims to love her husband Tony and to be grateful for what he has done for her, but she invites the painter L into their home and spends most of the novel conducting what certainly feels like an extended flirtation with him. Right from the start, M is drawn to L's work because it seems to represent to her an escape, a portal from what she is experiencing as a constricted life to one that might offer her freedom and transcendence. Even as she tries to articulate this, she seems to be aware that her yearnings are to some degree inexplicable:
There's no particular reason, on the surface, why L's work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman—but least of all, surely, a young woman whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallized in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentantly male down to the last brushstroke. (11)
M's frustration at the limitations she faces as woman, and her resentment of L (and Tony) for the freedoms they possess as males, seem to be rooted in the way she was treated, or remembers being treated, as a child. As she says later in the same paragraph, "The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better — would have been right, would have been how it ought to be — had I been a boy." (12)
In a climactic and emotionally fraught scene at the end of the novel, after M has finally talked L into painting her portrait, she puts on the only dress she owns that fits her closely, her wedding dress, and heads to the studio. Tony sees her going and screams at her to come back. She refuses, and walks into a situation that is even more fraught than the one she's walking out of.
By the end of the novel, M seems to have arrived at some sort of realization about the nature of truth and freedom and transcendence, but it's a realization shrouded in a sort of mystery:
The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal. (180)
That's the basis of her attraction to L's work, why it speaks to her, and what in the end she takes away from her interactions with him and with his work: that there is something on the other side of the surfaces of things, something that is accessible to us only through art, something that could set us free if only we could find our way to it. It cannot be apprehended directly by the senses or stated directly in words. This of course is not a new idea. Franz Kafka once said "I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones." Many other writers have made similarly enigmatic observations along these lines. (Anais Nin: "The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.")
M's struggles to get past her very individual and very personal limitations in order to arrive at Whatever It Is that is on the other side are at the heart of the dynamism of the plot of this book, such as it is. But there's a larger question that my group touched upon in our discussion: what is Rachel Cusk, the author, up to? She presents us with a character struggling against her own inclinations and her own limitations, a character who is drawn to art and also to some degree frustrated by art, a character who is perhaps admirable in her aspirations, but also hard to sympathize with, since so many of her frustrations seem to be the result of self-inflicted wounds.
I've thought about this and I'm not sure I have a definitive answer. But my working hypothesis is that it is precisely the inconsistencies and problematics of M's struggle that interest Cusk. It would have been easy enough to make M into a more insightful and capable character, and to make this book into feel-good story where L arrives and M is reborn as a triumphantly free and happy and fully realized person. But that kind of story arc is, well, a cliché, and if there's anything Cusk is not interested in it's clichés. She is regularly dinged by snarky reviewers who consider her work to be "frosty" and "humorless" and "astringent" and "convoluted." Several reviewers have gone so far as to object to the publisher's use of Optima, a sans serif type face, in her books; Dwight Garner, for example, makes the rather puzzling remark in his Times review that "Optima is unusual to see in a novel; it delivers to my eyes a chill sense of the void." Anthony Cummins, writing in The Guardian, goes him one better:
Cusk’s sans-serif Optima typeface, now as much a part of her brand as high-pressure deliberation on gender and selfhood, adds to an indefinable sense of threat, with the novel’s diction caught between the lecture hall and the analyst’s couch.
Obviously, these guys are going pretty far out of their way to find things to carp about. Equally obviously, Rachel Cusk's novels are not everyone's cup of tea. But I find them to be thought-provoking and relevant and insightful, not in the sense of delivering satisfying prefabricated epiphanies, but in the sense of posing questions well worth thinking about, both in terms of the workings of the novels themselves and in terms of they mirror the often muddy and complicated events of our own lives.
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